If you’re into racing and you are not watching MotoGP, stop reading this and set your DVR—or VHS machine if you are like our father-in-law—as the racing is wonderful. Even though we have an undying allegiance to 4-wheeled machines, the wheel-to-wheel action of a MotoGP race is unparalleled in motorsports. Plus, come March 29 and the season-opener in Qatar, you’ll get a glimpse of the most recent BMW M4 MotoGP safety auto, which, aside from the M-tastic graphics, has one rather notable deviation from its production brethren: water injection.
So even though the car is awesome—you require only to scope the photos to collect that—we’re very interested in the underhood addition. Injecting H2O into an engine’s intake plenum or directly into the cylinder cools the intake charge via the evaporative properties of water it is the same principle that makes air feel like ice when you get out of a pool on a windy day. Aircraft engines and racers have been employing water injection for years to cool the intake charge, which reduces knock. By reducing knock, the engine’s timing can be advanced and the engine cylinders can run at a slightly greater pressure, whether that be with a compression-ratio change or more increase in a forced-induction engine. Additional side effects of cooling the intake charge are lowered emissions and marginal gains in fuel consumption.
This all sounds great, correct? Effectively, not genuinely. Operating larger cylinder pressures typically indicates a stouter and heavier engine, as the possible for perforating a piston, block, or head is larger. Plus, if you get the injection quantity wrong and all the water doesn’t vaporize, the engine runs the threat of grenading due to the fact liquids do not compress. It is for these reliability reasons that we banned water injection from our series of Supertuner challenges we ran in the previous.
BMW begs to differ and says H2O will be pumped into the cylinders of a factory-constructed, production M automobile in the close to future, and this MotoGP pacer is demonstrating just that. Water is stored in a 1.3-gallon tank in the trunk and an electric pump sends it to 3 injectors in the intake plenum, downstream of the air-to-liquid intercooler. When the engine is operating at full load for extended periods of time, minimizing the intercooler’s effectiveness, these injectors start adding atomized water to the mix and by the time it gets to the combustion chamber—and we’re speaking fractions of a second—all that’s left is hydrogen and oxygen. Boost goes up, timing is advanced, and more power and torque result. BMW hasn’t released specific gains, nonetheless.
There’s a lot to perform out just before water injection is in showrooms. Aside from finding an H2O additive that’ll avoid freezing and not interfere with combustion, there’s a whole lot of programing, validation, and durability testing that demands to take place. If BMW water injection is indeed billed as an “emissions play” (we’re pondering “M Wasser Power” has a nice ring to it), the EPA will have concerns about how usually H2O should be added to the technique. For now, BMW says the method would have to be refilled with each and every tank of fuel and that if the trunk effectively runs dry, provisions are put in location to hold the engine operating. In other words, this pace automobile would run the typical programing that we currently get pleasure from from the 430-hp twin-turbo inline-6 of typical M4s.
How long will it be till we can see this in a production automobile? That’s entirely up to BMW. The upcoming M2 is close sufficient to reality that it may possibly be a stretch, but whether or not it has water onboard, it is absolutely going to slake our thirst for a tidily proportioned M vehicle.
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The Waterboy: BMW Debuts M4 MotoGP Pace Vehicle with Production-Intent Water Injection
